New Delhi, May 3
In a day of fast-paced developments, Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee today sent a diplomatic reply to his Pakistani counterpart Mir Zafarullah Khan Jamali’s letter inviting him to Pakistan in which Mr Vajpayee neither accepted nor rejected the invitation but reaffirmed India’s
commitment to improve relations with Islamabad.
Mr Vajpayee made it clear in his letter that a careful preparation should be made on the ground before the talks between the two countries at the highest political level took place. Also, Pakistan should prepare a conducive environment for the talks by putting an end to cross-border terrorism directed against India.
Diplomatic observers said Mr Vajpayee’s brief and prompt response to Mr Jamali’s letter received today only showed that the Vajpayee government was not willing to bite the Pakistani bait for the second time of summit-level talks without adequate preparation at the official level after its sour experience of the failed Agra summit in July, 2001. Mr Vajpayee’s letter was sent to Mr Jamali through diplomatic channels.
The Prime Minister’s response to Mr Jamali is indicative of New Delhi’s strategy of having a structured dialogue with Pakistan as against holding a knee-jerk summit, Agra style.
It is expected that Mr Vajpayee would deliberate on the issue of visiting Pakistan informally and formally at various fora like the Cabinet Committee on Security (CCS), Cabinet, Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and BJP’s allies in the ruling National Democratic Alliance (NDA).
Like two years ago, Mr Vajpayee may also convene an
all-party meeting for discussing the issue.
The role of the USA would be crucial this time as the failure of the coming Indo-Pak talks would be a blow to the USA’s strategic scheme of things as the Bush administration is involved in a big way in other high-priority international developments like the resumption of Israel-Palestinian peace talks, North Korean nuclear arsenal issue and post-war Iraq.
US Secretary of State Colin Powell called up External Affairs Minister Yashwant Sinha this morning and welcomed Mr Vajpayee’s peace initiative. He is believed to have praised Mr Vajpayee’s speech in Parliament yesterday. The important thing in this context is that Mr Powell called up Mr Sinha from Damascus, the Syrian capital.
Sources asserted that the Vajpayee government would speak clearly and with one voice to Pakistan and there would be no diverse views on the subject.
In his historic speech before Parliament yesterday, poet-Prime Minister Vajpayee had thrown the gauntlet to Pakistan by making it clear that India’s peace initiative would be “decisive and the last in my lifetime.”
After his ice-breaking address at a rally in Srinagar on April 18, Mr Vajpayee’s speech in Parliament would go down in history as yet another attempt by a Prime Minister who has been stabbed in the back, not once but twice, by the adversary to whom he is extending an olive branch once again.
Mr Vajpayee’s Lahore bus got stuck in Kargil. The July 2001 Agra summit was wrecked by none other than General Musharraf. He had violated all norms of a guest and attempted to gain cheap publicity at the cost of the host. Ironically, India was the first foreign country General Musharraf visited after he appointed himself President of Pakistan.
Diplomatic observers here say that an Indo-Pak thaw is clearly visible on the horizon. The two countries are heading towards
dialogue, snapped since the failed Agra summit. It remains to be seen whether this dialogue would be at the official or political level. If the two sides resume dialogue at the political level, it will have to be seen whether it would be at the level of foreign ministers or Heads of Government.
But the moot question is: if there is a dialogue, what will Pakistan talk? Only time will tell whether General Musharraf would be willing to scale down his “only Kashmir” rhetoric, whether he would be acceptable to fundamentalist sections in the Army and ISI and to fundamentalist parties if he dilutes his stand on Kashmir by agreeing to equal weightage to other issues in talks with India.
However, one must not forget that on April 10, General Musharraf had told representatives of the tribal Jirga in Peshawar, “Our struggle for Kashmir has been going on for 50 years. We cannot leave.” In the next breath he said; “We are a nuclear power. It will never end. Insha Allah it will increase.” General Musharraf talked as if the Kashmir issue and nuclear status were Pakistan’s two assets.
